It's Still Early Days For Dish And Programmatic TV; Josh McFarland Leaves Twitter

There’s a lot of hype around programmatic TV. Adam Gaynor, VP of media sales and analytics at Dish, acknowledges that his company is still in the “crawl phase.” Dish launched a programmatic exchange in 2015 for addressable inventory with Rocket Fuel, TubeMogul and DataXu [AdExchanger coverage], but programmatic TV is still more about targeting and addressability than it is about real-time bidding. “If we can take the same impressions we use for addressable and expose them in a platform where data can be matched automatically for buyers to buy addressable impressions quicker, that is what we see as potentially the future,” Gaynor said. More. Related: Dish’s SlingTV OTT bundle is adding local terrestrial channels through a hybrid streaming/broadcast device. TechCrunch has that story.

McFarland Moves On

Josh McFarland, who came to Twitter after it acquired his company TellApart, is on his way out. McFarland will join the VC firm Greylock Partners, which backed TellApart. “I’m so proud of what team @tellapart has accomplished since we combined forces, and Twitter is stronger because we are #oneteam,” McFarland wrote in a multi-part tweet. Twitter paid a massive amount for TellApart just over a year ago. It’s not clear if Twitter ever fully integrated the retargeter. Related: Twitter’s CTO, Adam Messinger, is leaving too. He tweeted: “After 5 years I’ve decided to leave Twitter and take some time off.”

Alexa For Ad Geeks

The marketing analytics firm Datorama announced an integration with Amazon’s Alexa voice service, dubbed “Ask Datorama Anything,” for enterprise purposes. “The modern marketer can [now] intuitively understand critical marketing information and trigger workflows at their desk, within meetings or in the boardroom,” the company pitches in a release. Really, it’s fairly gimmicky (but not a bad play, considering how many clients probably have an Alexa device sitting around the office). "Ask Datorama: What is my top-performing campaign by clicks in the last week?" is one prompt, for example. More at Ad Age.

WhatsApp With That?

The European Union is hitting Facebook with antitrust charges on its acquisition of WhatsApp. Regulators claim they were misled about the ability to link between Facebook and WhatsApp accounts, which Facebook said in 2014 that it could not reliably do. Facebook reversed that statement this year, when it made changes to its privacy policy allowing it to do exactly that. "The Commission takes the preliminary view that…the technical possibility of automatically matching Facebook users' IDs with WhatsApp users' IDs already existed in 2014,” the Commission said in a statement. “The Commission therefore has concerns that Facebook intentionally, or negligently, submitted incorrect or misleading information to the Commission, in breach of its obligations under the EU Merger Regulation." If Facebook is convicted of these charges, it faces up to a 1% fine in annual sales. More at Business Insider.